Thank you much for your letter, which I need not say interested me much. Still, I feel, though my heart is often in England, my path is for the moment shut up here. When I say, shut up, it is not complaint, for I have everything to bless God for, and that my path for Him is to abide quietly for the moment. Switzerland will certainly require a visit before I return to England. But I have felt through much weakness, the Lord blessing my soul, and I feel it is good to cultivate this; even in going to Montpellier, I feel that I rather dissipate myself, though there is some good there. The Lord has an intimate government of the soul which is infinite in love, but which one has to heed if one would have His face with one. At times one may have merely to go straightforward in the energy of His grace for others, and there is joy in service without much thought of self; at other times He leads in the way of exercise for our own good. We are here in a very little humble scale, and plentifully despised and opposed and spoken against by all of influence, but there is some blessing. Yesterday week in the morning, I think four at least got a clear view of the gospel and work of Christ. Yesterday I felt much less power. But it is a place where without positive power, there is nothing to do at all. This is necessarily in consequence a real trial for the soul.... But I have no uneasiness; I am satisfied God is in the storm (whatever instrumentality of Satan there may have been), and I have no doubt (whatever defects and want of faith there may have been), we, those who hold fast the beginning of our confidence, are in the same boat with Christ. Hence I can leave it all in peace till God clears me my way into the midst of the conflict, exercised, but at peace. But unless it is brought to me, I remain outside, because I am satisfied that is faith. I thank the brethren much for their prayers; I feel I am a poor workman, and my work is so negative just now, that there is little to say about it. But it holds the ground where reproach only was before, and carried the testimony of how good the gospel is, into souls, though they have not courage to walk with them with whom they have found it.
I find in scripture more depth, it is more real, true in Christ, and therefore has more infinitude in its character than ever. I was much struck lately with the way in which Christ was answered and overcame in Gethsemane and on the cross. I apprehend, while looking forward to the dreadful cup, the proper and immediate trial of Gethsemane was the power of Satan. "This is your hour and the power of darkness"—the great point was to get between His soul and the Father (as before, by desirable things for life). But he could not; Christ hence pleading with His Father, receiving nothing from Satan or man in the cup, receives it from His Father in perfect blessed obedience—" Thou hast brought me into the dust of death." Hence His soul is entirely out of the darkness in respect of His enemy, and He can say in perfect calm of others, "this is your hour and the power of darkness," and present Himself willingly that His disciples might go free. How blessed the perfectness, which at His own cost always kept them free; for in their position Satan would have caught them in his hour had not the Lord stood in the gap—and so ever—and when needed for Peter, can allow just so much as was good to sift, but stay the proud billows for him which were to go clean over His own soul. He was then, I judge, entirely out of the whole conflict with darkness, before it came in fact. He passed through it with God, His God.
At the cross, I apprehend it was another thing. He was forsaken of God, He had immediately to do with God and just wrath against sin, and He in that place, so that love could have no refuge for His soul; and here too He is perfect, and having accomplished this ineffable work, His soul having drunk the cup unmixed, atonement having been made, He comes forth from it as heard, and His act of death is merely His own giving up His spirit to His father: in the time of peace He had said so, but He was to pass through death in His soul, and did, as an offering for sin—but then, what was death? It was one who had overcome death, undergone it in its infinite atoning efficacy, and who gives up His soul, more than pure, which had put away sin, into the hands of God His Father. What is death here, if the overcoming of Satan made it obedience? The bearing of wrath gave title to give up life into the merited reception of infinite favor. Death was His. It was not yet power in resurrection, but His soul given up to His Father. It was death, but death the closing of an accomplished life of obedience in woe, and the introduction into that infinite favor in life beyond all relationship of promise down here, which the work in which He had glorified the Father placed Him in; and so, through Him is death to us. It ceases to be a closing life; we have a title through Him to give up our souls in it into His hands as we see in Stephen; it is the closing of the conflict to be in the life in the power of which we live to Him—absent from the body and present with the Lord. He gave Himself up—it was power, though in reference to the Father, into whose hands He commends His spirit, that His resurrection might be by the glory of the Father. For in this even He did not take glory to Himself. Death, or what is called death, is thus a totally new thing; it is having done with all as a redeemed soul, to enter into another world. But I speak now of Christ. He had emerged from all this sorrow, far more dreadful hour, and could tell the thief he should come with Him into paradise, speak in peace to John of His mother—His hour was come for this—and knowing that all was accomplished, after saying, "I thirst," give up His own soul into His Father's hands. These two considerations have deeply affected me; save in some details, I never traced the general bearing and importance. I must close.
Though I sorrow over dear kind brethren like——-, I bless God with my whole heart that the brethren have been given to be faithful, and have proved themselves clear in this matter. Kind love to all.
Ever affectionately yours.
Nismes,
November, 1849.